"Now there's a steal by Bird!"

First appeared on August 25th, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

If uncertain economic times have taught us anything it’s that good deals are hard to come by. And before you lose interest, this isn’t one of those tired “gas was only 95 cents when I was a senior” columns (although it really was). No, I’m afraid this is a tired column of a different sort.


For proof times are hard, and to see how far the mighty have fallen, one need look no further than high society’s long-time standard bearer. Of course we’re talking about Denny’s, home of the Grand Slam breakfast and godsend for heart surgeons everywhere.

Born from their obvious love of the Colts and a less obvious, but more understandable, desire to increase the number of hands on their menus, Denny’s is offering fans free coke or coffee anytime Indianapolis beats an opponent at the Luke by more than 24 points. Really? 24 points? The only deal more generous would be McDonalds giving away free ketchup packets if Peyton throws for 6,000 yards and 18 touchdowns in the third quarter of a Thursday night game.

But just when it seemed the days of cheap coffee and free television were gone, the Pacers may have stumbled upon the deal of the century in trading for point guard Darren Collison. OK, so maybe it’s not the deal of the century but it is a trade that doesn’t involve money or the all too popular “player to be named later”. It’s not uncommon for trades to force the part-time sports columnist to report the facts and do what we as Americans do best; point out all the shortcomings while predicting the ultimate doom of professional sports itself.

In a four team trade the Pacers sent Troy Murphy to New Jersey and received point guard Darren Collison and small forward James Posey from New Orleans. Other players involved were Indianapolis native Courtney Lee who left the Nets to join the Rockets as former Laker Trevor Ariza who went from Houston to the Hornets.

Pacers President Larry Bird made it clear earlier in the summer that the Pacers needed talent at the point guard position. After targeting Collison in college the Pacers were forced to wait until last week before finally landing him. In Collison, a former Bruin and Rancho Cucamunga native, the Pacers get a second year player who showed promise while covering for an injured Chris Paul. He is also a player who, as his former college coach Ben Howland put it, ‘only cares about winning’.

The unfortunate thing for the Pacers is, when you’re a franchise with more issues than British Petroleum, this trade likely becomes a mere Band-Aid. In dealing Murphy a team that was already one of the leagues worst at rebounding loses its top rebounder. In getting veteran James Posey, the Pacers gain the last thing they really needed- another talented wing.

Posey’s acquisition is intriguing however, considering he has two championship rings and is a proven winner (playoffs 6 of the last 8 years). But the Pacers depth at wing likely relegates him to being the X factor who may never get the chance to be an X factor for he would have to take time from either the Pacers best scorer (Granger), their best defender (Dahntay Jones) or their top draft choice (Paul George).

These issues admittedly appear more manageable now that Bird has secured a talent who might be able to fill some seats. For now the Pacers should keep Collison around, if for no other reason than fans will get to hear Mark Boyle wrestle with “Rancho Cucamunga” on a nightly basis.

August not the best time to give up on Baseball

First appeared on August 22nd, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

After much thought and intense Phil-Jackson-like soul searching, I’ve decided to make one of the boldest predictions in the history of part-time pretend sports columnists. I am ready to say, with a record of 20 games under .500, the Cubs won’t be winning the World Series again this year.


Just writing those words alone has forced me to call upon every power I have as both a writer and Cubs fan. It’s like Ronald McDonald eating a Whopper or Neil Armstrong admitting he never went to the moon.

With their baseball season lost for another 8 months, Cubs fans now find themselves on the hunt for a new sport to fill their downtime. Meaningful football is still a month away which means we’ve entered an uncomfortable lull in the world of sports. And, with officials breaking up the Cockfighting ring in Shelby County earlier this summer, another option has been eliminated for those of us who lack a social conscience or have gambling problems.

Perhaps like me, most Cubs fans turned to Shark week on Discovery to fill the void a combination of quality starts and anemic run production has left within us all. Shark Week taught us a lot. Like the fact the male Bull Shark’s testosterone level is a staggering 900. Knowing the average human's level is closer to a measly 40 suddenly makes cleaning the Gulf look far less pressing.

It bears mentioning the last time I had it checked my doctor said, instead of a Bull Shark, my testosterone level was somewhere closer to that of a wildebeest; a rabid wildebeest with access to performance enhancing drugs and a vendetta against a high school English teacher who once compared his writing to something off a Bazooka wrapper no doubt.

With 125 reported shark attacks last year off the coast of South Africa alone it’s clear the campaign launched by Great White’s everywhere to restore the despotic reputation Jaws helped them build in the seventies is going well. Forget the 8,000 miles one must travel to get there or the fact you don’t fill a bathing suit as flatteringly as you once did, now there are 125 more convenient reasons you should never swim off the coast of South Africa.

Gambling requires money, Euchre requires thought and playing sports requires actual physical activity. I need a sport I can watch that allows me to achieve a state of vegetativeness while remaining as horizontal as possible. That sport was baseball until I gave up on the season.

If there’s a silver lining anywhere it’s the fact the Cubs aren’t the only ones playing meaningless baseball this late in the season. Currently there are six Major League teams who are more than 20 games out of first place.

So it is in a Bermuda Triangle of apathy Cub fans must remain adrift until real football arrives. Another depressing September and fruitless October await. We can only hope ours will be a fall full of warm temperatures, bright foliage and highlights of anyone besides the Yankees or Cardinals.

In the meantime I suppose my free time will be filled tackling the insurmountable task of potty training our 2 year old. Exciting, maddening and unpredictable-it contains all the elements of sport and, at the rate we’re progressing currently, chances are he will keep us busy until opening day 2011 anyway.

Given the progress we’ve seen to this point, one must wonder which will happen first; his shedding his last diaper, or my beloved Cubs hoisting another championship banner. Here’s an insiders tip straight out of Vegas- My son is more stubborn than me, smart money rides on the North-Siders.

This just in: Tiger Woods is human

First appeared on August 11th, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

In December of 1975 Earl and Tida Woods welcomed their son Eldrick Tont (Tiger) Woods into the world. That’s right, he came out screaming and covered with cow snot just like the rest of us. He is not, contrary to popular opinion, the incarnation of Eastern Blok scientists laboring for a new class of super-athlete capable of resurrecting the iron curtain through the domination of American sport, or a castaway from the third planet from Altar. There’s a real human being under that black swoosh hat and red polo.


Coming off one of the worst finishes of his career at the Bridgestone Invitational over the weekend, Tiger’s troubles on and off the course are center stage again. Like the Bat Signal glowing on the horizon, we’ve seen the headlines of a very public divorce and turned out en masse to rescue our hero by dumping advice on him like toxic waste in a Jersey landfill.

Diagnoses range from his having a George Steinbrenner-like relationship with swing coaches to the obvious inability to focus as his world crumbles before him on the most public of stages.

Before I go on, allow me to stray from my point like a poorly struck 3 wood. But if anything, his performance this weekend has simply affirmed what many of us have known all along. Golf is the most frustrating sport in the history of man. And as we watched the myth that was Tiger Woods slowly deflating to human form Sunday let it be a reminder that no man is above the media. And don’t kid yourself, even as bad he’s playing right now, you’re better off dancing in the fairway to “Anyway you Want It” Rodney-Dangerfield-style than going so far as to fool yourself that your game will ever approach his.

The thing that gets lost in all of this is that Woods is a human being just like you and I. Well, I guess I shouldn’t speak for you considering the Japanese have robots capable of reading newspapers to the elderly and those too young to read. Yes Woods can make a golf ball do amazing things, but the basic fact remains there are grocery clerks who possess skills Tiger does not.

Who knows what they are. Maybe Woods can’t change a spark plug or read Latin, whatever it is for every one Tiger there are 10,000 others out there whose skills are just as, if not more, valuable. It’s just too easy to turn on ESPN and forget ours is a diverse world full of people with varying strengths (the most by far being outside the sports world). The hang up is, at least in our culture, the value that we place on athletic skill is undoubtedly out of balance.

Which brings me to my point. This isn’t about Tiger Woods. This is more about how wrapped up in sports we can get. Sports are entertainment, a wonderful form of escape. We love sports, but in true American fashion watching sports simply isn’t enough; we want more (see the Louisiana Purchase or Oprah starting her own network). We want our athletes to be other-worldly. We don’t want them to be ordinary people with everyday problems.

Perhaps in Tigers case everyone is to blame. We as a public for rubbernecking at Woods like a train on hippo collision and Tiger for not taking a break from the tour to focus on getting his personal life together. Either way we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that he’s only a few shanked tee balls away from being the accountant living down the street.

And now for the least researched NFL preview in the history of the world

First appeared on August 4th, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

For those of us who consider soup can labels to be quality leisure reading a new television season looms like the promise of a good 5 cent cigar or high speed internet for all. The networks will tell us the greatest season of new shows awaits when in all likelihood half will get cancelled, one might reach syndication and the rest will suffer the wrath of the unemployed screenwriter (i.e. television critics).


However fans of the NFL are likely to discover the most dramatic and entertaining moments will appear on the gridiron this season. TV aficionados and fantasy football geeks won’t struggle for discussion topics should some strange nexus of the universe ever bring them together.

Television and football are not all that different. In fact many parallels exist between the upcoming football season and those TV programs we’ve come to love so; or at least I’m going to use the next 400 words to pretend as much.

After cashing a ridiculous paycheck, Washington Redskins defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth promptly celebrated by failing multiple conditioning tests. For taking over 20 million dollars in salary before demanding a trade and then attempting to make amends by doing nothing but eating donuts and Corn Puffs all offseason, Haynesworth has quickly become the NFL’s version of “The Biggest Loser”. Scorned by every sports columnist in the nation, including the part-time pretend, Haynesworth has become a popular man in the league for all the wrong reasons. In the end however it will likely be Skins owner Daniel Snyder and new coach Mike Shanahan that will be the biggest losers in all of this.

Nothing will compare to what we will likely see coming out of Cincinnati this season. The Bengals have created “must see TV” by brining Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson and free agent wide out Terrell Owens together. I give it five games before we’ll be treated to something reminiscent of a hilariously bizarre episode of “The Marriage Ref”.

By dubbing themselves the “dynamic duo”, Ochocinco and Owens have proved true the old theory that anyone giving themselves a nickname is either painfully desperate, friendless or a victim of Father Time whose production is waning. After all, isn’t referring to yourself as a superhero a bit ambitious considering all legitimate superheroes earned their nicknames by doing something other-worldly like reversing the spin of the Earth or winning a seat as a Tea Party candidate, not simply showing up for training camp?

All American Boy Tim Tebow has joined the Broncos and his jersey is already moving faster than free beer. With him doing everything at the college level short of walking on water, Tebow is the closest thing the NFL has to an “American Idol”. I see Randy telling Tebow “it just didn’t do it for me dog” before Paula makes an embarrassing pass at him. Unfortunately, after trying to squeeze into a 3T T-shirt, Simon will have asphyxiated; thus leaving the deciding vote uncast.

It’s time for a big finish now because I’m running out of space (and ideas).For breaking tradition in training camp and refusing to carry a veteran’s pads, Cowboy rookie Dez Bryant appears cut from the same cloth as those stars of TV’s “The Apprentice”. This shoe fits if for no other reason than he’s soon to be whispering “you’re fired” into Roy Williams’ ear.

What about the Colts you ask? Longevity, a single marketable superstar, consistent greatness and a history of doing things with class? Sounds like “The Simpsons” to me. Either way, enjoy this season football fans for the great lock out of 2011 promises wall to wall infomercials for all.